Philip Kerr - A Philosophical Investigation

Jake regarded the body carefully. It didn’t look so bad. A dead man always looks tidier than a dead woman. Usually the clothes are left on, and there are no mutilations. Nothing missing like a breast or a nipple. No presents left inside the private parts. There were worse ways to get it than six times in the back of the head. This one reminded her of some photographs she had once seen of Mafia hits in Palermo. The neatness of the gang executions had surprised her. There was very little disruption to whichever business (usually a restaurant) was being operated on the premises. Just a few shots in the head and then out, leaving the victim to a pop-eyed contemplation of his shirt-front or his navel or his minestrone.

It was the same with this killer. Jake knew he must be a neat, fastidious sort of man. But she wondered if he took any pleasure in the actual act of killing. Or if, like a mob gunman, it was just something that had to be done, like filling in your tax-return, or going to the dentist. Business. Nothing personal. Just business.

She sat down in the seat behind the body, with Detective Inspector Stanley, who had been on the scene for rather longer, placing himself in the seat beside her. He didn’t say anything. There wasn’t any explanation needed to picture what had happened. Finally she nodded and said: ‘Any witnesses?’

Stanley tugged his shirt collar down from his Adam’s apple and flexed his neck before answering.

‘Most of them buggered off the minute someone noticed that Mr Armfield, codenamed René Descartes, had been shot.’ He laughed scornfully. ‘Probably scared that their wives might find out that they’d even been in a dump like this.’

‘What about the people who run this fleapit?’

‘Well we’ve got the girl who was performing on stage at the time. And the owner, Mr Grubb. He was upstairs, on the cash desk. But they both say they don’t remember seeing anything.’

Jake pointed at the stage. ‘The girl would have been less than six metres from the killer when he fired. With those spotlights on she must have been able to see his face.’

‘Apparently she had her back to the audience for the greater part of the act,’ he explained uncomfortably. ‘And also she was on all fours.’

‘Doing what precisely?’

Stanley sighed and readjusted his shirt collar. ‘I believe she was enjoying a bottle of champagne, ma’am,’ he said, smiling thinly. ‘Ab anam.’

‘I see,’ Jake said with distaste. It never ceased to astonish her what men would find to entertain themselves.

‘About how many men were watching this obscenity?’

‘Grubb says he sold about ten or fifteen tickets in the two hours leading up to Armfield’s death. We’ve already had the contents of his till sent down to the lab in case there are any prints.’

Jake pointed at the bloodstained back of the seat in front of her. ‘Looks to me as if he might have been splashed a bit. There can’t have been too many men walking out of here with blood on them.’

Stanley shrugged. ‘Grubb says he can’t remember.’

‘Perhaps he just doesn’t like policemen much. Any previous convictions?’

‘A couple. Living off immoral earnings. Old stuff really.’

Jake glanced around at the cheap surroundings. ‘Tell this Grubb that you’re going to have a fire and safety officer go over this place. That he’s going to look for broken fire alarms, blocked fire exits, that kind of thing. See if that doesn’t jog his memory a bit. Then I want you to get some men to question everyone in this street. Building workers, traffic wardens, messengers, prostitutes, shop owners, everyone. I want to know if anyone remembers seeing a man with blood on him. Got that?’

‘Ma’am.’

‘Now, where’s this girl who was on stage?’

‘I told her to wait in the dressing room,’ said Stanley. ‘I thought you’d want to question her.’ He pointed to the side of the stage. ‘Through that curtain.’

Jake stood up and walked round in front of the seats. She stepped onto the stage and looking across the busy scenes-of-crime officers, tried to picture the scene as it might have appeared to anyone performing there. For Jake it was almost beyond imagination. The seating looked as if it had been removed from an old bus. There was a large hole in one of the flock-covered walls. Cheap linoleum covered the uneven floorboards of the small stage. From the toilets came the strong smell of disinfectant. It was hard to conceive of anyone choosing to come to this particular purgatory for entertainment. But come the men had, with direct eyes, to watch a woman’s loss of being and general descent. Men, like rats in a cellar, waiting to feed upon a woman’s corpse.

What must it be like? she asked herself. To stand there naked in front of a roomful of strangers. Worse than just naked: to perform, to display your body’s functions, to become a living anatomy lesson for some amateur medical students. She wrapped her arms around herself and shuddered with disgust.

‘Give us a show, ma’am,’ someone called out. There were several guffaws.

Jake glanced back at her colleagues with cool distaste. They were all the same. ‘Just get on with it,’ she sneered.

The dressing room was hardly much more than a walk-in wardrobe, with a couple of clothes rails that were empty save for a couple of wire coat-hangers, and a wall mirror that made it seem bigger. Underneath a bare lightbulb was a girl about twenty years old, wearing nothing more than a red flannel dressing gown like the one Jake wore herself when she went to see Doctor Blackwell. Jake’s unwilling witness sat on a greasy-looking futon, smoking a cigarette and muttering angrily.

‘Who are you?’ she snarled as Jake came through the door. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’m Chief Inspector Jakowicz.’

‘Can I go now?’ demanded the girl, like a petulant child.

‘Hadn’t you better get dressed first?’

The girl stubbed out her cigarette on the cover of an old magazine and jumped up from the futon.

‘I’d like to ask you a few questions,’ said Jake.

‘I’ve already spoken to the other copper. I told him all I had to say.’

‘Yes, well I don’t much blame you for not telling him much,’ said Jake. ‘I can’t say I’m all that fond of talking to him myself. Especially in a place like this. It’s only a place like this that lets you see men as they really are.’

The girl snorted. ‘That’s for sure.’ She shook her head in accession to Jake’s request. ‘Oh all right, ask away, if you want. But lock the door, will you? I don’t want any of your mates walkin’ in ’ere while I’m gettin’ dressed and gettin’ a free eyeful.’

Jake turned the key in the lock and leaned against the door.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked, searching her bag for a cigarette.

‘Clare,’ said the girl, and slipped off her dressing gown.

Jake lit her Nicofree and regarded the girl’s nakedness with an almost critical attention, as if she had been a painter or a sculptor. It was not a pretty face. It was perhaps not even handsome. Her nose was broken but not badly. The lips were too voluptuous and the teeth slightly protruding. Of intellect there was little sign, but you couldn’t have mistaken the hard cunning that was visible in the face. Her skin was smooth and supple-looking. She seemed too young to be doing this kind of thing, but Jake left that unsaid at the risk of sounding patronising.

Clare rummaged in a tartan duffle-bag and found her underwear.

There was such a wanton libidinous aspect to the tough little face which seemed quite to overcome all its manifest imperfections. Jake could see now how she would be attractive to men.

‘You saw it all, didn’t you?’ she said.